The Free Rules. It has every class and a subclass, a bucket of magic items, and a whole menagerie of monsters. For free.
Every other element isn't necessary. You can play D&D with a character sheet, a few pencils and a set of dice. I'm not sure people understand how amazing this concept is. Pre-2000s you *had* to buy the PHB (rules), DMG (magic items) and the MM (monsters) in order to have any real ability to play.
If you're time rich, and cash poor, make it up yourself. You don't need a dozen new player options books. You don't need another campaign setting. You don't need to buy everything on the store. You use the free rules, and make up the rest. You like something enough to put cash down, you can do so.
You do NOT NEED every product. You barely need any products.
You're not being priced out of the game. You're being priced into FOMO. And FOMO is a problem created on its own.
While this is technically true, it isn't really in practice. A lot of people, especially new players, won't want to homebrew things, and if they don't have the PHB, they probably won't have many ideas for subclasses to homebrew, plus they won't have examples of how to balance the subclasses. If you only have one subclass per class, how are you expected to get any idea of how powerful features need to be?
For context on book price increases, a point you pertinently and accurately raised:
The 2014 PHB MSRP released in August 2014 was $49.99
As of May 23rd, 2023 that MSRP increased to $59.99
Adjusting for inflation between August 2014 and May 2023, that $49.99 converts to $63.92, making books as of that increase functionally $3.93 or 6% cheaper
As of today, that difference is $7.80 or 11.5%
Building on the above:
- The 4e PHB came out in June, 2008. Its MSRP was $34.95; $51.52 adjusted for inflation.
- The 3.5 PHB came out in July, 2003. Its MSRP was $30.00; $52.62 adjusted for inflation.
- The 3.0 PHB came out in July, 2000. Its MSRP was $29.95; $55.91 adjusted for inflation.
- The 2e PHB came out in April, 1989. Its MSRP was $20.00; $52.41 adjusted for inflation.
- The AD&D PHB in June, 1978. Its MSRP was $9.95; $49.23 adjusted for inflation.
Looking at every single PHB ever published, in terms of purchasing power to obtain, only the AD&D PHB is cheaper than the $49.99 MSRP of the current PHB.
...being on a fixed income, which has been greatly reduced since Trump took office, I can't afford any of this new content being released. Wizards picked a horrible time to increase prices.
Anyone else feeling the pinch?
It has been stated already. There is no need to move on to the latest edition. My table is well-off, but we have consciously chosen not to migrate to the new edition, and our game is none the worse for wear.
The Free Rules. It has every class and a subclass, a bucket of magic items, and a whole menagerie of monsters. For free.
Every other element isn't necessary. You can play D&D with a character sheet, a few pencils and a set of dice. I'm not sure people understand how amazing this concept is. Pre-2000s you *had* to buy the PHB (rules), DMG (magic items) and the MM (monsters) in order to have any real ability to play.
If you're time rich, and cash poor, make it up yourself. You don't need a dozen new player options books. You don't need another campaign setting. You don't need to buy everything on the store. You use the free rules, and make up the rest. You like something enough to put cash down, you can do so.
You do NOT NEED every product. You barely need any products.
You're not being priced out of the game. You're being priced into FOMO. And FOMO is a problem created on its own.
While this is technically true, it isn't really in practice. A lot of people, especially new players, won't want to homebrew things, and if they don't have the PHB, they probably won't have many ideas for subclasses to homebrew, plus they won't have examples of how to balance the subclasses. If you only have one subclass per class, how are you expected to get any idea of how powerful features need to be?
People new to this hobby should not be spending money on it until they have finished at least a short campaign or two utilizing the free stuff. There is a giant mountain and ocean of free stuff. D&D is a niche hobby, and not many people enjoy it even after trying it. If people really want to spend money on this hobby, I prefer they spend it on food and drinks from local restaurants to support their local economy, rather than sending money to a faraway corporation like Hasbro.
And since we are on this digital platform, do not spend money on D&D Beyond until you have also tried Roll20, Fantasy Grounds, and Foundry as well. Go to your local and/or online D&D community and ask for help to see if anyone is willing to Share Content on Beyond with you, and then you can activate the Master Tier subscription and try out the full experience for a month. Do the same with other digital platforms, and engage with their online community as well. It is more work and research, but giving yourself time to familiarize with the hobby and all the different products lets you make better purchasing decisions later.
Beyond is convenient and great for beginners and casual players, but it is not exactly the best tool for people who want more out of the hobby. A lot of minor mechanics are just not supported, and it can get really frustrating when a product that used to feel so convenient start to feel like a cage that stops you from experiencing the vast expanse and the itty-bitty details of the game. UA is not supported either. Homebrew is extremely limited. Improvements have also significantly slowed down since Hasbro assumed ownership. If you are a GM who wants to really make D&D your hobby, I think Beyond is a fine reference tool, but I do not think Beyond cuts it as a one-stop-shop digital platform to run your games from. If you are a GM who just wants to run casual simple game, Beyond will do the job just fine, but I would still highly recommend checking out other digital tools first. And if you want buy physical books, avoid Beyond and just go to your LGS; Hasbro's shipping and handling is utterly subpar and unacceptable for a corporation of its size. The average Ebay seller have more consistent and more protective packaging. The best Hasbro delivery packaging I have seen is a book wrapped in cardboard mesh inside a cardboard box, which is fine if it is not raining. The worst is when it is just a book tightly fitting inside a cardboard box, meaning the book is not protected from bumps and drops, and dents and crumpled corners on the books are common.
The PHB is not a good starting point for beginners in my opinion. I bought a bunch of books when I started, and it took my group several extra session 0's to get things going because people spent a lot of time reading. BR/SRD should be the standard default entry point into D&D, but Wizards realistically speaking is not going to heavily advertise a free product. Keeping it short and simple gets the game going much quicker and sooner, and I personally recommend cutting out character generation and use pregenerated character sheets for people's first campaign. Once the group has finished their first campaign, are more familiar with the rules, and are ready for a second campaign, I think then is better time to introduce character creation.
Balance is an overrated concept in my opinion, especially with how varied the game can be when it is ran by different GMs. D&D is generally ran as a cooperative PvE game, so tight balance between classes and subclasses is not necessary in my opinion. Making sure everyone is having fun is more important than pulling out Excel to make sure everyone is doing roughly the same amount of damage. While UA is not super balanced, it is basically the free rough draft version of all the published mechanics. Unless you are running a PvP game or something where balance is necessary, using UA as-is would be more than sufficient.
I will also point out that there are many avenues to start playing TTRPGs. I have at least 6 full TTRPGs that I bought either from a licensed online distributor or by visiting a HPB near my home. None of these are 5E but they are all fantasy (OK, Gamma World isn't) role-playing games and I don't have $50 tied up in them combined.
The Free Rules. It has every class and a subclass, a bucket of magic items, and a whole menagerie of monsters. For free.
Every other element isn't necessary. You can play D&D with a character sheet, a few pencils and a set of dice. I'm not sure people understand how amazing this concept is. Pre-2000s you *had* to buy the PHB (rules), DMG (magic items) and the MM (monsters) in order to have any real ability to play.
If you're time rich, and cash poor, make it up yourself. You don't need a dozen new player options books. You don't need another campaign setting. You don't need to buy everything on the store. You use the free rules, and make up the rest. You like something enough to put cash down, you can do so.
You do NOT NEED every product. You barely need any products.
You're not being priced out of the game. You're being priced into FOMO. And FOMO is a problem created on its own.
While this is technically true, it isn't really in practice. A lot of people, especially new players, won't want to homebrew things, and if they don't have the PHB, they probably won't have many ideas for subclasses to homebrew, plus they won't have examples of how to balance the subclasses. If you only have one subclass per class, how are you expected to get any idea of how powerful features need to be?
For a home game, it doesn't really matter all that much. Most homebrew I've seen that has access to every source is still wildly overpowered, and people love it.
But the point is, the OP is complaining about having to keep buying new content. None of it is necessary, it's only FOMO.
D&D is a very affordable game, you don't need to invest any money to play, WoTC even provides free Basic rules and adventures to do so and some website such as Roll20, Discord as well. For more out of it we need to spend a little but i would say it's a relatively cheap hobby or passion to have compared to many others.
Wizards picked a horrible time to increase prices.
The only thing I have to compare it with is the TSR of old. Don't have years and years of experience with Wizards of the Coast or Wizards by way of Hasbro. But I'm beginning to suspect they can't find their, you know, face with both hands.
The new starter set for $50 is perplexing to me. Wizards seems to think if you're pushing punch-out counters across a poster map, you have a board game. They're about to find out that people who like $50 board games want premium components, starting with an actual board. How happy would you be if your $50 board game came with a poster map instead of a board? How is it that Hasbro doesn't seem to grasp this?
On the D&D side, $50 feels like a lot to ask a newbie player to shell out. And if the set isn't compatible with D&D, which it may or may not be, given that no one seems to know whether player characters can advance levels, as a D&D starter set the box is a dead end. As a ready-to-play D&D adventure for existing groups, it's a dead end. As a self-contained D&D-like experience, fine -- but then your $50 got you a box of cheap-looking components to set up on a poster map.
So three likely purchaser profiles -- premium board game players, people who want to get started in actual D&D, and people who want to run modern D&D games in the Caves of Chaos -- either aren't served by the product on offer (maybe) or aren't getting $50 of value from it.
While this is technically true, it isn't really in practice. A lot of people, especially new players, won't want to homebrew things, and if they don't have the PHB, they probably won't have many ideas for subclasses to homebrew, plus they won't have examples of how to balance the subclasses. If you only have one subclass per class, how are you expected to get any idea of how powerful features need to be?
There are free subclasses all over the place, both for the 5.1 SRD and now for 5.2.1 since that came out. You are in no way stuck with just "one subclass per class."
Yeah you'll have to evaluate them yourself rather than depending on any official process but... you get what you pay for.
The new starter set for $50 is perplexing to me. Wizards seems to think if you're pushing punch-out counters across a poster map, you have a board game. They're about to find out that people who like $50 board games want premium components, starting with an actual board. How happy would you be if your $50 board game came with a poster map instead of a board?
It contains 18 different maps. There are plenty of games where the tradeoff between 'one board' and '18 posters' is perfectly fair. As for $50 being 'premium' games... no, it really isn't. Gloomhaven was MSRP $140 in 2017 (about $180 today).
...being on a fixed income, which has been greatly reduced since Trump took office, I can't afford any of this new content being released. Wizards picked a horrible time to increase prices.
Anyone else feeling the pinch?
Sorry to hear about your difficulty, it is a shame that so few are sympathetic to those in difficult situations and so quick to dismiss their experiences. I hope things get better.
The new starter set for $50 is perplexing to me. Wizards seems to think if you're pushing punch-out counters across a poster map, you have a board game. They're about to find out that people who like $50 board games want premium components, starting with an actual board. How happy would you be if your $50 board game came with a poster map instead of a board?
It contains 18 different maps. There are plenty of games where the tradeoff between 'one board' and '18 posters' is perfectly fair. As for $50 being 'premium' games... no, it really isn't. Gloomhaven was MSRP $140 in 2017 (about $180 today).
$50 is at the low end in the hobby board game market. Catan: $50. Carcassonne: $42. Ticket to Ride: $50. Pandemic: $45. Dominion: $47. Etc. (Yes, you can do better from amazon or a discounter. That'll be true of this set, too.)
People, boardgames and D&D players alike, are going to look at it as what it is: an introduction to D&D. It looks like it's got quite a lot of stuff in it. The components look good quality for what they are. Nobody expects to get 200 cards, 200 wooden/plastic tokens, plus 18 boards for $50.
As for the idea that
And if the set isn't compatible with D&D, which it may or may not be, given that no one seems to know whether player characters can advance levels, as a D&D starter set the box is a dead end.
Just in the stuff we can easily see, there's both a red dragon wyrmling, and also the second-level spell Arcane lock. Both of these don't make a lot of sense in the speculated game where PCs don't level. (Neither does the promised 40-60 hours of gameplay, which would get pretty repetitive.) There's literally no evidence it's anything but D&D.
...being on a fixed income, which has been greatly reduced since Trump took office, I can't afford any of this new content being released. Wizards picked a horrible time to increase prices.
Anyone else feeling the pinch?
Sorry to hear about your difficulty, it is a shame that so few are sympathetic to those in difficult situations and so quick to dismiss their experiences. I hope things get better.
I think you've failed to read the points people are making, but I can spell them out again if you'd like.
- books haven't increased in price
- you don't need to buy the new books to stay in the hobby, that's just the consumerism talking
- you don't even need to spend any money to play D&D, there's a wealth of free content
- if you're feeling the pinch financially, just keep playing D&D with the books you have
...being on a fixed income, which has been greatly reduced since Trump took office, I can't afford any of this new content being released. Wizards picked a horrible time to increase prices.
Anyone else feeling the pinch?
Sorry to hear about your difficulty, it is a shame that so few are sympathetic to those in difficult situations and so quick to dismiss their experiences. I hope things get better.
I think you've failed to read the points people are making, but I can spell them out again if you'd like.
- books haven't increased in price
- you don't need to buy the new books to stay in the hobby, that's just the consumerism talking
- you don't even need to spend any money to play D&D, there's a wealth of free content
- if you're feeling the pinch financially, just keep playing D&D with the books you have
You failed to comprehend my post, i mentioned nothing about costs as they are irrelevant to the OP's plight as I addressed it, with sympathy something lacking in several posts in this thread. Just because you aren't feeling the pinch doesn't mean others aren't and a little understanding and sympathy goes a long way. More people should try it rather than the more popular path of dismissal.
OPs post was that they were being "priced out of the hobby" because of an implicitly recent price increase. Myself and others were not commenting on their own personal financial situation, but the veracity of their claims:
The books have increased in price recently - no they haven't. The books have increased in price once back in May of 2023, a price increase which was to adjust for inflation and actually tracks below it.
They are being "priced out of the hobby" - no they're not. There's no requirement to buy the new books to play the hobby - you can keep playing with the books you already have. In fact there's no requirement to by any books to play D&D. You can use the free basic rules plus the cornucopia of free content out there, including what's on D&D Beyond.
All that folks including myself have address is their claims as they relate to continuing to play D&D. It seems disingenuous to right off what people have said just because they've not expressed sympathy for the OPs wider financial situation. The long and short is you can't be priced out of D&D because you don't need to spend money to keep playing D&D, or start playing for that matter.
You failed to comprehend my post, i mentioned nothing about costs as they are irrelevant to the OP's plight as I addressed it, with sympathy something lacking in several posts in this thread. Just because you aren't feeling the pinch doesn't mean others aren't and a little understanding and sympathy goes a long way. More people should try it rather than the more popular path of dismissal.
The reality is, inflation sucks, but D&D isn't an outlier and is probably a very small part of the actual impact on the OP; measured in dollars per hour of entertainment D&D (and RPGs in general) remains a quite inexpensive hobby.
...being on a fixed income, which has been greatly reduced since Trump took office, I can't afford any of this new content being released. Wizards picked a horrible time to increase prices.
Anyone else feeling the pinch?
Sorry to hear about your difficulty, it is a shame that so few are sympathetic to those in difficult situations and so quick to dismiss their experiences. I hope things get better.
I think you've failed to read the points people are making, but I can spell them out again if you'd like.
- books haven't increased in price
- you don't need to buy the new books to stay in the hobby, that's just the consumerism talking
- you don't even need to spend any money to play D&D, there's a wealth of free content
- if you're feeling the pinch financially, just keep playing D&D with the books you have
You failed to comprehend my post, i mentioned nothing about costs as they are irrelevant to the OP's plight as I addressed it, with sympathy something lacking in several posts in this thread. Just because you aren't feeling the pinch doesn't mean others aren't and a little understanding and sympathy goes a long way. More people should try it rather than the more popular path of dismissal.
OPs post was that they were being "priced out of the hobby" because of an implicitly recent price increase. Myself and others were not commenting on their own personal financial situation, but the veracity of their claims:
The books have increased in price recently - no they haven't. The books have increased in price once back in May of 2023, a price increase which was to adjust for inflation and actually tracks below it.
They are being "priced out of the hobby" - no they're not. There's no requirement to buy the new books to play the hobby - you can keep playing with the books you already have. In fact there's no requirement to by any books to play D&D. You can use the free basic rules plus the cornucopia of free content out there, including what's on D&D Beyond.
All that folks including myself have address is their claims as they relate to continuing to play D&D. It seems disingenuous to right off what people have said just because they've not expressed sympathy for the OPs wider financial situation. The long and short is you can't be priced out of D&D because you don't need to spend money to keep playing D&D, or start playing for that matter.
I'd argue Buzzard is missing how making suggestions about how to keep enjoying the hobby with little or no money invested is being sympathetic to the OP. Nobody has to dwell on how unfun it is to be in a tight spot financially. I expect we're all familiar with how hobbies and other things that are deemed nonessential suffer when times are tight. Giving someone options for how to keep enjoying the hobby shows sympathy.
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While this is technically true, it isn't really in practice. A lot of people, especially new players, won't want to homebrew things, and if they don't have the PHB, they probably won't have many ideas for subclasses to homebrew, plus they won't have examples of how to balance the subclasses. If you only have one subclass per class, how are you expected to get any idea of how powerful features need to be?
Building on the above:
- The 4e PHB came out in June, 2008. Its MSRP was $34.95; $51.52 adjusted for inflation.
- The 3.5 PHB came out in July, 2003. Its MSRP was $30.00; $52.62 adjusted for inflation.
- The 3.0 PHB came out in July, 2000. Its MSRP was $29.95; $55.91 adjusted for inflation.
- The 2e PHB came out in April, 1989. Its MSRP was $20.00; $52.41 adjusted for inflation.
- The AD&D PHB in June, 1978. Its MSRP was $9.95; $49.23 adjusted for inflation.
Looking at every single PHB ever published, in terms of purchasing power to obtain, only the AD&D PHB is cheaper than the $49.99 MSRP of the current PHB.
I don't think comparing the price of the 2024 PHB to previous handbooks is fair when WotC insisted that this wasn't a new edition.
It has been stated already. There is no need to move on to the latest edition. My table is well-off, but we have consciously chosen not to migrate to the new edition, and our game is none the worse for wear.
New edition or not is irrelevant. Plus the comparison is being made both within 5th edition and without
Find my D&D Beyond articles here
Didn't need to be a new edithion, is a new Core book
It was a comprehensive rules update. As we saw with 3.5, that can happen without creating a new edition.
People new to this hobby should not be spending money on it until they have finished at least a short campaign or two utilizing the free stuff. There is a giant mountain and ocean of free stuff. D&D is a niche hobby, and not many people enjoy it even after trying it. If people really want to spend money on this hobby, I prefer they spend it on food and drinks from local restaurants to support their local economy, rather than sending money to a faraway corporation like Hasbro.
And since we are on this digital platform, do not spend money on D&D Beyond until you have also tried Roll20, Fantasy Grounds, and Foundry as well. Go to your local and/or online D&D community and ask for help to see if anyone is willing to Share Content on Beyond with you, and then you can activate the Master Tier subscription and try out the full experience for a month. Do the same with other digital platforms, and engage with their online community as well. It is more work and research, but giving yourself time to familiarize with the hobby and all the different products lets you make better purchasing decisions later.
Beyond is convenient and great for beginners and casual players, but it is not exactly the best tool for people who want more out of the hobby. A lot of minor mechanics are just not supported, and it can get really frustrating when a product that used to feel so convenient start to feel like a cage that stops you from experiencing the vast expanse and the itty-bitty details of the game. UA is not supported either. Homebrew is extremely limited. Improvements have also significantly slowed down since Hasbro assumed ownership. If you are a GM who wants to really make D&D your hobby, I think Beyond is a fine reference tool, but I do not think Beyond cuts it as a one-stop-shop digital platform to run your games from. If you are a GM who just wants to run casual simple game, Beyond will do the job just fine, but I would still highly recommend checking out other digital tools first. And if you want buy physical books, avoid Beyond and just go to your LGS; Hasbro's shipping and handling is utterly subpar and unacceptable for a corporation of its size. The average Ebay seller have more consistent and more protective packaging. The best Hasbro delivery packaging I have seen is a book wrapped in cardboard mesh inside a cardboard box, which is fine if it is not raining. The worst is when it is just a book tightly fitting inside a cardboard box, meaning the book is not protected from bumps and drops, and dents and crumpled corners on the books are common.
The PHB is not a good starting point for beginners in my opinion. I bought a bunch of books when I started, and it took my group several extra session 0's to get things going because people spent a lot of time reading. BR/SRD should be the standard default entry point into D&D, but Wizards realistically speaking is not going to heavily advertise a free product. Keeping it short and simple gets the game going much quicker and sooner, and I personally recommend cutting out character generation and use pregenerated character sheets for people's first campaign. Once the group has finished their first campaign, are more familiar with the rules, and are ready for a second campaign, I think then is better time to introduce character creation.
Balance is an overrated concept in my opinion, especially with how varied the game can be when it is ran by different GMs. D&D is generally ran as a cooperative PvE game, so tight balance between classes and subclasses is not necessary in my opinion. Making sure everyone is having fun is more important than pulling out Excel to make sure everyone is doing roughly the same amount of damage. While UA is not super balanced, it is basically the free rough draft version of all the published mechanics. Unless you are running a PvP game or something where balance is necessary, using UA as-is would be more than sufficient.
Check Licenses and Resync Entitlements: < https://www.dndbeyond.com/account/licenses >
Running the Game by Matt Colville; Introduction: < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-YZvLUXcR8 >
D&D with High School Students by Bill Allen; Season 1 Episode 1: < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52NJTUDokyk&t >
I will also point out that there are many avenues to start playing TTRPGs. I have at least 6 full TTRPGs that I bought either from a licensed online distributor or by visiting a HPB near my home. None of these are 5E but they are all fantasy (OK, Gamma World isn't) role-playing games and I don't have $50 tied up in them combined.
For a home game, it doesn't really matter all that much. Most homebrew I've seen that has access to every source is still wildly overpowered, and people love it.
But the point is, the OP is complaining about having to keep buying new content. None of it is necessary, it's only FOMO.
D&D is a very affordable game, you don't need to invest any money to play, WoTC even provides free Basic rules and adventures to do so and some website such as Roll20, Discord as well. For more out of it we need to spend a little but i would say it's a relatively cheap hobby or passion to have compared to many others.
The only thing I have to compare it with is the TSR of old. Don't have years and years of experience with Wizards of the Coast or Wizards by way of Hasbro. But I'm beginning to suspect they can't find their, you know, face with both hands.
The new starter set for $50 is perplexing to me. Wizards seems to think if you're pushing punch-out counters across a poster map, you have a board game. They're about to find out that people who like $50 board games want premium components, starting with an actual board. How happy would you be if your $50 board game came with a poster map instead of a board? How is it that Hasbro doesn't seem to grasp this?
On the D&D side, $50 feels like a lot to ask a newbie player to shell out. And if the set isn't compatible with D&D, which it may or may not be, given that no one seems to know whether player characters can advance levels, as a D&D starter set the box is a dead end. As a ready-to-play D&D adventure for existing groups, it's a dead end. As a self-contained D&D-like experience, fine -- but then your $50 got you a box of cheap-looking components to set up on a poster map.
So three likely purchaser profiles -- premium board game players, people who want to get started in actual D&D, and people who want to run modern D&D games in the Caves of Chaos -- either aren't served by the product on offer (maybe) or aren't getting $50 of value from it.
Who's left to buy it?
There are free subclasses all over the place, both for the 5.1 SRD and now for 5.2.1 since that came out. You are in no way stuck with just "one subclass per class."
Yeah you'll have to evaluate them yourself rather than depending on any official process but... you get what you pay for.
It contains 18 different maps. There are plenty of games where the tradeoff between 'one board' and '18 posters' is perfectly fair. As for $50 being 'premium' games... no, it really isn't. Gloomhaven was MSRP $140 in 2017 (about $180 today).
Sorry to hear about your difficulty, it is a shame that so few are sympathetic to those in difficult situations and so quick to dismiss their experiences. I hope things get better.
$50 is at the low end in the hobby board game market. Catan: $50. Carcassonne: $42. Ticket to Ride: $50. Pandemic: $45. Dominion: $47. Etc. (Yes, you can do better from amazon or a discounter. That'll be true of this set, too.)
People, boardgames and D&D players alike, are going to look at it as what it is: an introduction to D&D. It looks like it's got quite a lot of stuff in it. The components look good quality for what they are. Nobody expects to get 200 cards, 200 wooden/plastic tokens, plus 18 boards for $50.
As for the idea that
Just in the stuff we can easily see, there's both a red dragon wyrmling, and also the second-level spell Arcane lock. Both of these don't make a lot of sense in the speculated game where PCs don't level. (Neither does the promised 40-60 hours of gameplay, which would get pretty repetitive.) There's literally no evidence it's anything but D&D.
I think you've failed to read the points people are making, but I can spell them out again if you'd like.
- books haven't increased in price
- you don't need to buy the new books to stay in the hobby, that's just the consumerism talking
- you don't even need to spend any money to play D&D, there's a wealth of free content
- if you're feeling the pinch financially, just keep playing D&D with the books you have
Find my D&D Beyond articles here
OPs post was that they were being "priced out of the hobby" because of an implicitly recent price increase. Myself and others were not commenting on their own personal financial situation, but the veracity of their claims:
All that folks including myself have address is their claims as they relate to continuing to play D&D. It seems disingenuous to right off what people have said just because they've not expressed sympathy for the OPs wider financial situation. The long and short is you can't be priced out of D&D because you don't need to spend money to keep playing D&D, or start playing for that matter.
Find my D&D Beyond articles here
The reality is, inflation sucks, but D&D isn't an outlier and is probably a very small part of the actual impact on the OP; measured in dollars per hour of entertainment D&D (and RPGs in general) remains a quite inexpensive hobby.
I'd argue Buzzard is missing how making suggestions about how to keep enjoying the hobby with little or no money invested is being sympathetic to the OP. Nobody has to dwell on how unfun it is to be in a tight spot financially. I expect we're all familiar with how hobbies and other things that are deemed nonessential suffer when times are tight. Giving someone options for how to keep enjoying the hobby shows sympathy.